Why You Don't Have to Give Up Soda—Yet

New study suggests swapping just one soft drink for water every day can lower your calories enough to help weight loss and better health.

Good news, unrepentant slurpers: You don’t have to quit it all at once. No matter how many soft drinks you tend to swill, swapping just one of them daily for water can lower your calories enough (about 6%) to help you lose weight and improve your overall health, a new Virginia Tech study has found.

Yeah, we get it: You can’t (or, be honest—just don’t want to) give up your addiction. You guzzle soda like it’s carbonated crack, even when faced with the constant barrage of research proving that the syrupy sweetened drinks can make you fat, give you diabetes, raise your risk of a heart attack, and cause myriad other bad, bad, really bad health problems.

So, if you’re one of the junkies: Till the next scathing study comes out, how about just trying the swap?